The existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in a discrete ponds dilemma
Vasily Gusev,
Alexander Nesterov,
Mikhail Reshetov and
Alex Suzdaltsev
Games and Economic Behavior, 2024, vol. 147, issue C, 38-51
Abstract:
In a variety of economic situations discrete agents choose one resource among several available resources and, once admitted to the resource of choice, divide it among fellow agents admitted there. The amount of the resource an agent gets is proportional to her relative ability to acquire this particular resource, what we refer to as an agent's weight at the resource. The relevant applications include students self-selecting into colleges, politicians self-selecting into races, and athletes self-selecting into teams. We find that this game has a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in at least three special cases: 1) when agents have the same weight at each resource, 2) when all resources are the same, 3) when there are only two resources. We also show that this game always has an approximate Nash equilibrium when the number of players is large. Existence in the general case remains an open problem.
Keywords: Congestion games; Potential games; Pure Nash equilibrium; Sorting into contests; College admissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D78 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825624000812
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:147:y:2024:i:c:p:38-51
DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.06.001
Access Statistics for this article
Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai
More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().